“If you build it, he will come” may have worked for Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams but it’s unlikely to work for the rest of us. For a small business, web build is just the start.
Without an awareness of the role social media and search engines play in driving traffic around the web, your business is unlikely to be discovered online. Without a steady flow of useful, interesting and relevant content, your site is unlikely to be visited in decent numbers.
Understand the role of all three – social, search and content – and there’s every chance that he, she and they will come.
Content
1. Be useful, relevant and interesting
“Be useful” is the first rule of content marketing. It means writing about what you know, for an audience that is looking for advice and information broadly about what you offer. Identify and write for your core audience. Understand their needs and deliver words, videos and images with authority. Don’t be tempted to go off-piste. Stick to your specialism.
2. Be regular
It’s no use producing a slew of articles in month one and then nothing for another six. Well-written and engaging content drives awareness among potential customers and clients, gives existing customers and clients a reason to return and helps enhance search engine rankings (see below). So feed the beast.
3. Be alive to events
This doesn’t just mean producing content that uses big seasonal holidays, anniversaries or set piece sporting occasions as a jumping off point – although these might prove suitable. It means being aware of the world around you and being able to react where relevant. For example, a breaking news or entertainment story might provide a hook. Equally, that day’s Google Doodle might be about something or somebody relevant to your business. If you’ve got something relevant to say, then say it, especially if a digital behemoth like Google is helping to drive interest.
4. Be essential
Consider putting a “gate” around some of your content, exchanging access to a whitepaper or ebook, say, for some basic details about the would-be customer or client including, naturally, a contact email address.
Social media
5. Don’t just sell
Here’s the comedian Ricky Gervais on how best to use social media. “I treat Twitter like a marketing tool and to make it a good marketing tool you’ve also got to be entertaining. You can’t just say ‘Buy this, buy this, buy this’.” It’s good advice. It means sharing and engaging, being useful and, yes, being entertaining.
6. Measure it
Social media marketing is not an exact science so monitor what you do and learn from failure as well as success. Use free services such as Google Analytics to measure impact on website traffic. Meanwhile, use social network-specific tools such as Twitter Analytics to monitor engagement. Data should inform, not dictate, decision-making.
7. Sometimes pay for it
All the main social networks have a variant of the sponsored post. It’s worth experimenting with these, especially as most of the networks will credit your account with some “free money” to encourage you to get started. Given the volume of users these networks have and what they know about them, a well-crafted promo that’s equally well-targeted can produce results.
Search engines
8. Understand what search engines want
Google, Yahoo!, Bing and the rest are looking to deliver results that best match the user query. Given that organic search drives 64% of all website traffic, according to one recent study, it’s worth taking note of search company methods. How do they do it?
It’s complicated, but broadly two factors come into play. The first is relevance – do the words on the page match the search query? The second is authority – is the site considered credible? Key to assessing credibility is the number of in-bound links from other credible websites. Knowing this should inform your approach to search engine optimisation, (SEO) whether you do it yourself or buy in the services of others.
9. Create a site that’s easy to navigate
This is not only useful for the visitor, it helps Google et al efficiently crawl the entire site and index its content accordingly. Good internal linking, a sitemap and a logical URL structure are key.
10. Know your on-page from your off-page SEO
On-page SEO is about good housekeeping. This includes:
• Writing headlines and introductions that reflect the users’ search queries. Free tools including Google’s Keyword Planner and Google Trends can help establish some of the phrases to use;
• Labeling of images, including the unseen ALT tags;
• Regularly updated content;
• Regular broken link checks.
Off-page SEO, meanwhile, is about marketing your websites externally. This means effective use of social media, newsletter campaigns and inbound links all working to drive immediate traffic, but also enhancing the search ranking of the site. Securing inbound links is one of the most important pieces of the SEO puzzle. Encourage, cajole and persuade partners, peers and customers to link back. One of the best ways to link build? Create useful, relevant and interesting content that people want to share. Which leads us back to step one.
Jon Bernstein is an associate journalist and digital strategist at Slack Communications. He tweets @jon_bernstein
Content on this page is paid for and produced to a brief agreed with Simply Business, the UK’s biggest business and landlord insurance provider, and sponsor of the supporting business growth hub.
